The Tendencies of Chemistry 



descriptive. Its objects are the same as those 

 of natural history with Buffon and Linnaeus. 

 Chemical species, like living ones, are designated 

 by a binary nomenclature; we say potassium 

 sulphate as we say Fells leo. Having provided 

 his classification with the orders and sub-orders 

 necessary for a methodical organisation of his 

 work, the chemist gets to business; as the 

 naturalist classifies his plants between the 

 leaves of an herbarium and arranges his animals 

 in glass cases, so the chemist lays in a stock 

 of bottles, and from that day his aspiration 

 is to fill each bottle with a definite product, 

 preferably crystallised. (Amorphous bodies are 

 impure and uninteresting in his eyes.) The 

 text-book of classical chemistry, true to the 

 spirit of the laboratory, will fill its hundreds 

 of pages with descriptions of the chemical 

 species which we have seen labelled in the 

 laboratory, and teach us in rigid sequence the 

 manner of their preparation, the analysis to 

 test the purity of the product, their physi- 

 cal, organoleptic, and finally their chemical 

 properties that is to say, the manner of their 

 action on various other bodies. So the reader 



25 



